2018 Blog Goals – Mid Year Review

2018 Blog Goals – Mid Year Review

Welcome to the midway point (more or less) of the year. It’s time again to take a look at my 2018 blog goals and see how I’m doing against those goals. When we last peeked in at the end of the first quarter of this year, I was meeting one of the three goals that I had set for the year. I made an effort to do a bit more promotion of this site on Twitter, not to mention completing a minor site redesign to make it a bit easier for mobile readers to follow the blog.

Now that the year is half done, how am I doing on those goals? Let’s check in.

Goal 1: 20 New WordPress Followers

There’s both good news and bad news with how I’m doing on this goal. The good news is that I managed to pick up triple the number of followers in Q2 of 2018 as I did in Q1. The bad news is that I’m still well short of my 20 new follower goal for the year. At this point, hitting half of this goal would still mean an uptick in followers from the pace I’ve been at throughout the first half of the year, though it’s probably more realistic than the full goal. That said, I was behind pace on the next goal as well and made it up, so perhaps this will change.

Goal 2 – Average 250 Visits Per Month

Well. This changed in a hurry. Thanks to May and June being the two highest traffic months in the history of my blog (as well as April being the 4th highest to date), instead of sitting just shy of my goal pace, I’m over 1.2 times my goal pace1If we look solely at the May/June pace, it would be nearly 1.6 times my pace. That would be nice to see the rest of the year.. Averaging 250 visits per month would mean that I would get 3,000 site visits by the end of the year. If I continue my current yearly pace, this site should end the year in the neighborhood of 3,500 site visits. Hitting 3,500 would be impressive, especially considering I felt like 3,000 was a bit ambitious. I’m hoping that the launch of my Patreon will drive additional traffic to the blog, meaning there may even be an outside chance to get to 4,000 site visits. That would be amazing. The more fun fact that lets me be optimistic about this goal as we hit the second half of the year is that nearly every month this year has seen growth in the number of site visits AND unique visitors to the blog per day. It makes me hopeful that the growth is sustainable.

Goal 3 – Grow Comment Count by 20% Again

While my first two goals saw growth from Q1 to Q2, my comment count goal — though still being ahead of pace — wasn’t quite as fortunate these past three months. It wasn’t a major downtick in comment count, hence still making the goal pace. That said, I’d love to get this back on my original pace from Q1. Considering there are some extra posts going up in July (as well as potentially August), there will be extra opportunities for comments. We’ll see if that helps though.

How are you doing on your 2018 goals? If you’re a blogger, podcaster, YouTuber, or other creator, have you made changes to your goals for the year? Sound off in the comments.